La palabra, el puño y el puñal

La fatwa que pesa sobre el escritor inglés Salman Rushdie cumplió 20 años el mes de febrero. En numerosos diarios en el mundo la conmemoración fue motivo para reiterar el repudio al barbarismo fundamentalista y celebrar el respeto liberal por el intercambio desinhibido de opiniones. Fue también pasto para el ejercicio retórico: a pesar del asedio del fanatismo religioso, se dijo, los fundamentos de la libertad de expresión permanecen incólumes.

Es una pena que el paisaje del fundamentalismo musulmán y sus excesos se haya convertido en el trasfondo de la apología de la palabra. El contraste entre los dos mundos (el radicalismo islámico y el paraíso liberal) tiende a producir defensas alicortas y poco imaginativas, que al final terminan asentadas en dogmas. “La libertad de expresión es valiosa porque la alternativa es la tiranía teológica o la igualmente tirana corrección política”. Ésa parece ser la moneda corriente en un sector de la opinión pública internacional, incluida la mexicana, lo cual entraña una notable paradoja: una libertad cuyas apologías más lúcidas subrayan el poder del libre discurso para quebrar los caparazones dogmáticos termina parapetada tras una muralla de dogmas grandilocuentes pero huecos.

Texto completo: http://www.nexos.com.mx/?P=leerarticulo&Article=379

por la censura

un futuro sin musulmanes ni extranjeros: alemania para los alemanes.
que alguien le extienda inmunidad "pseudoliberal" a la publicidad del movimiento ciudadano por munich. yo la quemaria toda, sin cargo liberal de conciencia.

como vivir bajo el techo (ma)(pa)terno sin privaciones sexuales

las dos gibas

los camellos son animales enigmaticos. yo nunca he podido clasificarlos. no se decir si son creaturas confiables o desleales; mansas e inofensivas o broncas y peligrosas; bobas o taimadas; arrogantes y algo soberbias o humildes y hasta depresivas; misticas o pedestres.

dos referencias literarias contribuyen a iluminar un par de los rasgos fundamentales de la personalidad de nuestro merodeador desertico: su proclividad a la depresion y su celo apocaliptico. esas son las dos gibas temperamentales del camello.

cortazar cuenta la historia de guk, rumiante inolvidable, victima del asedio social que lo declara "indeseable". el perfil de guk nos revela la hondura y la complejidad de la psique del camello, depresivo por naturaleza y vocacion. las propiedades de la "camellidad" son dificiles de discernir, pero la depresion es sin dudad una de ellas. Por eso lo ultimo que hay que decirle a un camello es que es un animal non grato, so peligro de causarle gran pena y posteriormente la muerte. que el consejo no caiga en oidos sordos: todos, a fin de cuentas, llevamos un camello dentro.

escribe cortazar:

"Aceptan todas las solicitudes de paso de frontera, pero Guk, camello, inesperadamente declarado indeseable. Acude Guk a la central de policía donde le dicen nada que hacer, vuélvete a tu oasis, declarado indeseable inútil tramitar solicitud. Tristeza de Guk, retorno a las tierras de infancia. Y los camellos de familia, y los amigos, rodeándolo y que te pasa, y no es posible, por que precisamente tú. Entonces una delegación al Ministerio de Tránsito a apelar por Guk, con escándalo de funcionarios de carrera: esto no se ha visto jamas, ustedes se vuelven inmediatamente al oasis, se hará un sumario.

Guk en el oasis come pasto un día, pasto otro día. Todos los camellos han pasado la frontera, Guk sigue esperando. Así se van el verano, el otoño. Luego Guk de vuelta a la ciudad, parado en una plaza vacía. Muy fotografiado por turistas, contestando reportajes. Vago prestigio de Guk en la plaza. Aprovechando busca salir, en la puerta todo cambia: declarado indeseable. Guk baja la cabeza, busca los ralos pastitos de la plaza. Un día lo llaman por el altavoz y entra feliz en la central. Allí es declarado indeseable. Guk vuelve al oasis y se acuesta. Come un poco de pasto, y después apoya el hocico en la arena. Va cerrando los ojos mientras se pone el sol. De su nariz brota una burbuja que dura un segundo mas que él."

¿y que del halito apocaliptico que rodea al camello? digamos lo que dice mark strand, quien captura el animo (the animus?) de este mamifero inefable --heraldo de malas noticias, aguador de fiestas, mensajero ominoso-- de la siguiente manera. strand:

"On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
“You ruined it. You ruined it forever.”"

ruines camellos que anuncian la ruina en que convertimos nuestra vida por una creencia. runas cuadrupedas que anticipan ruidosamente la fatalidad humana.

"only words"

free speech 'absolutists' -those who argue that no restriction on speech at all is justified- are absolutely stupid. Their stupidity surfaces in all its pettiness when they argue against anti-pornography regulations. "Do not censor any idea, no matter how contemptible and disgusting you find it -they say- for ideas can do you no harm". Contempt and disgust is what most feminist theorists feel when they are confronted with these arguments, and their retort to them is that it is disingenuous to assert that words of sexual abuse, such as those that are typical in pornographic material, are harmless. Catharine MacKinnon: "As incantations while sexual abuse is occurring, they carry that world with them... sexual terms [do not merely] reference a reality [...] they reaccess and restimulate body memory of it for both aggressor and victim [...] 'Being offended' is the closest the First Amendment tradition comes to grasping this effect." In the eyes of most 'absolutists', pornography is conceived in terms of what it says, not in terms of what it does. In this view, forms of communication cannot do anything bad but offend. But offense is all in the head, the argument goes. It is assumed that words have only “referential relation to reality”. Thus pornography is defended as "only words".
This view, MacKinnon argues, is problematic because it conveniently disregard the fact that social inequality is created and enforced –done— through words and images. Social hierarchy cannot and does not exist without being embodied in meaning and expressed in communications. (“Whites Only”, “Juden nicht erwuenscht”, “fuck me or you’re fired”, and so on). “Elevation and denigration are all accomplished through meaningful symbols and communicative acts in which saying it is doing it”. That is why it is better to understand pornography in constructing and performative terms, than in referential and connotative ones. Absolutism notwithstanding.

shame

Shame has a bad reputation in modern ethical and political thought because it threatens to fly directly in the face of self-respect of individuals. Your actions (or your failure to act), your failings (or you zealotry) or your defects can earn you the contempt, the derision or the avoidance of others. You then feel ashamed, you blush, you descend a step in the scale of self-respect, you become less respectable in the eyes of others. Next you wish to hide or, better yet, to disappear.

But shame is not only demeaning; it is also enslaving. It robs you of the possibility of becoming a moral agent, an autonomous being capable of legislating for yourself. Shame is a drive, a source of heteronomy. Shame, or fear thereof, has a grip on the knob of the door to autonomy. It means the death of the self-legislating individual, who thus ignores the voice of her reason coming from within and pays head to the shrill of others coming from without.

Is there a way to view shame under a more favorable light? Bernard Williams believes that there are resources in a seemingly unexpected place, Greek thought, which would readily allow us to acknowledge shame’s more positive role. He argues that if the attempt to retrieve a favorable version of shame from a supposedly “primitive” tradition of moral thought such as the Greek appears to you as a stretch –it might even strike you as a perilous idea—that is probably because you have an erroneous understanding of the way in which shame worked in Homeric society. It is a mistake to think that shame in the world of Homer “involves merely adjustment to the prejudices of the community” or that shame has “as its object only the competitive success or failures of the individual.” Shame, Williams argues, is in that society a source of normativity--it helps agents to discern between good and bad deeds, between and moral course of action and an immoral one. Williams:

“An agent will be motivated by prospective shame in the face of people who would be angered by conduct that, in turn, they would avoid for those same reasons. […] These reciprocal attitudes have a content: some kinds of behavior are admired, others accepted, others despised, and it is those attitudes that are internalised, not simply the prospect of hostile reactions. If that were not so, there would be, once more, no shame culture, no shared ethical attitudes at all. […] The other may be identified in ethical terms. He […] is conceived as one whose reactions I would respect; equally, he is conceived as someone who would respect those same reactions if they were appropriately directed to him.”

pessoa

confundir la necesidad y el deseo. ese es el problema del romanticismo segun pessoa:
"Todos --dice-- necesitamos de las cosas indispensables para vivir, para conservar y prolongar la vida: todos deseamos una vida mas perfecta, una felicidad absoluta, la realidad de nuestros sueños y []
Es humano querer lo que necesitamos, es humano desear lo que no necesitamos pero nos resulta deseable. Lo que es ya una enfermedad es desear con igual intensidad lo que es necesario y lo que es deseable, y sufrir por no ser perfectos como si se sufriera por no tener pan. El mal del romanticismo es este: es querer la luna como si hubiera alguna manera de obtenerla."
hay muchas maneras de sufrir, y una de ellas es la perfeccion, idiotez bañada en oropel. hay que sufrir para merecer. tambien hay que ser idiota.